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Real-time ride-hailing dispatch

Uber Dispatch System

Uber

Uber processes millions of ride requests daily, matching riders with drivers in under 10 seconds using geospatial indexing and real-time location tracking. Built on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, the dispatch system combines a matching engine on OKE that optimizes for ETA, surge pricing algorithms that balance supply and demand, and event-driven architecture with OCI Streaming handling location updates flowing at thousands of events per second. Best suited for teams building location-aware marketplaces that require sub-second matching at city-wide scale.

Data Flow

Rider API
Driver API
Dispatch Service
Matching Engine
Surge Pricing
Location Tracker
Driver Locations Cache
Trips Database
Location Events
Notifications

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Service Breakdown (10 services)

Other10 services
Rider API
  • Routes API traffic and enforces policies
  • Manages authentication and rate limiting
  • Provides a unified API endpoint
Driver API
  • Routes API traffic and enforces policies
  • Manages authentication and rate limiting
  • Provides a unified API endpoint
Dispatch Service
  • Orchestrates containerized workloads at scale
  • Auto-scales pods and underlying nodes
  • Supports rolling updates and rollbacks
Matching Engine
  • Orchestrates containerized workloads at scale
  • Auto-scales pods and underlying nodes
  • Supports rolling updates and rollbacks
Surge Pricing
  • Orchestrates containerized workloads at scale
  • Auto-scales pods and underlying nodes
  • Supports rolling updates and rollbacks
Location Tracker
  • Orchestrates containerized workloads at scale
  • Auto-scales pods and underlying nodes
  • Supports rolling updates and rollbacks
Driver Locations Cache
  • Caches frequently accessed data in-memory
  • Reduces database round-trips and latency
  • Supports TTL-based expiration policies
Trips Database
  • Handles flexible schema data at scale
  • Provides low-latency reads and writes
  • Scales horizontally with partitioning
Location Events
  • Ingests and processes real-time event streams
  • Supports multiple consumer groups
  • Buffers data for reliable downstream delivery
Notifications
  • Runs event-driven code without servers
  • Scales instantly from zero to peak load
  • Cost-effective for sporadic workloads

Scaling Strategy

The dispatch system scales horizontally by sharding geospatial data across regions. Location updates flow through OCI Streaming for ordered processing, while the matching engine on OKE scales compute independently from the pricing service. NoSQL Database provides single-digit millisecond reads for trip data at any scale, and OCI Cache keeps driver location indexes hot for sub-10-second matching.

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